Carol

It is 1952. Therese Belivet works in the toy department of a Manhattan department store over the Christmas rush, designing theatre sets in her spare time, and going through the motions of a relationship with a young man she does not love. Carol Aird comes to the counter to buy a doll for her daughter. She is blonde, elegant, in her mid-thirties, and everything Therese has not known to want.

What follows is a love story — careful, precise, told entirely through Therese’s perspective, which is the perspective of someone who has not yet understood that she is capable of love, let alone this kind of love. Carol invites her to lunch, then to her house in New Jersey, then on a road trip west. Carol’s husband, aware of her previous relationships with women and using the fact in the divorce, has hired a private detective. The road west is also a flight.

Carol — originally published as The Price of Salt under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, because Highsmith feared her crime-writing career could not survive it — is the most directly personal thing she ever wrote, based on an encounter with a customer when she herself worked in a department store in 1948. It is also the most anomalous: a love story, not a thriller, with a genuinely happy ending, written by the author who specialised in the psychology of guilt. Todd Haynes filmed it in 2015 with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, and both the film and the novel deserve their reputations.

Reading Guides

• Patricia Highsmith Books in Order
• Where to Start with Patricia Highsmith

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Carol apart: The love story is genuinely tender and precisely observed; Therese’s point of view is beautifully rendered; and The 1950s New York atmosphere is impeccably detailed. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Carol give it weight beyond its surface narrative. The first mainstream American novel to end a lesbian love story happily. Highsmith’s most autobiographical work — based on a real encounter. Published under pseudonym for decades; claimed as her own only late in her life. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Patricia Highsmith’s prose in Carol is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

Quieter and less thriller-driven than her other work — different expectations required. The plot mechanics around Carol’s divorce are occasionally laborious. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Literary fiction readers; LGBTQ+ fiction readers; fans of the 2015 film

The Publication History

Carol was published in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, not as “Patricia Highsmith.” Highsmith’s editor at Harper & Brothers encouraged her to publish it under a false name, fearing the novel’s lesbian content would damage her career as a crime writer. She agreed. The book sold well — it received considerable word-of-mouth attention among LGBTQ+ readers, who recognised in it something they had rarely encountered in mainstream publishing: a lesbian love story that did not end in tragedy, renunciation, or suicide. Highsmith received thousands of letters from readers over the years, many of them describing the personal significance of finding a story that ended happily.

She maintained the pseudonym for three decades. It was not until 1990, two years before her death, that she allowed The Price of Salt to be republished under her own name, with a new afterword in which she described the real encounter — a customer in the toy department of a New York department store in 1948 — that inspired the novel. The customer was a woman in a mink coat. Highsmith said she felt “a chemical change” on seeing her, went home that evening and wrote eleven pages in a kind of fever, and retained her image for the rest of her life.

The 2015 Film

Todd Haynes’s adaptation, Carol, was released in 2015 and received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress (Cate Blanchett) and Best Supporting Actress (Rooney Mara). The film is scrupulously faithful to the novel’s atmosphere: the 1950s New York period detail, the quality of Therese’s longing, the specific texture of a love story conducted under observation and threat. Blanchett’s Carol is the novel’s Carol — magnificent, brittle, aware of the cost of what she is doing — and Mara’s Therese captures the specific quality of a young woman discovering that the categories she had been given for her own feelings are not sufficient. The film introduced a new generation of readers to the novel and confirmed what Highsmith’s European admirers had long argued: that she was not only the finest crime writer of her generation but one of the most perceptive chroniclers of desire and its social constraints in postwar American fiction.

Highsmith’s Most Personal Work

Highsmith wrote prolifically throughout her career about men — men who obsess, men who kill, men whose psychology is rendered with the merciless precision of an author who understands the specific texture of a certain kind of masculine pathology. Carol is different: it is written from the inside, about an experience that was her own, and the tenderness it contains is more fully realised than anything in the thriller novels. Therese’s gradual discovery of what she feels, and her inability to name it or defend it, is one of the most honest accounts of the disorientation of falling in love in Highsmith’s work.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Highsmith’s most personal novel and a landmark of LGBTQ+ literature — a love story told without apology, ending without punishment, written under a pseudonym she maintained for thirty years.